42 EXPERIMENTAL TECHNIQUES May/June 2001

Series Editor’s Note: This series of articles is dedicated to Prof. Peter K. Stein, in honor of his distinguished 40-year career as the leading educator in the engineering of measurement systems for test and evaluation. The authors are privileged to be students of Prof. Stein more years and more data channels ago than they care to remember! The basic assumption for this series is that thereader has at least a cursory familiarity with mea-surement systems for strain, under laboratory con-ditions, with both foil and wire bonded resistance strain gages. This basic familiarity includes adhesive, ce-ramic and flame spray bonding techniques; standard wiring methods; and standard signal conditioning approaches. Fur-ther, the authors assume some familiarity with system fre-quency responses. We focus, here, on foil and wire strain gages for the measurement of dynamic strain and the real problems associated with the generation of demonstrably valid dynamic strain data. Piezoresistive and semiconductor strain gages are not discussed here due to their properly infrequent use in structural dynamics testing. Any mention of commercial products in this series implies neither an endorsement nor recommendation by the authors. Products are mentioned to support explanation of funda-mental measurement principles that must be understood if valid dynamic strain data is to be acquired